


Can't Pretend

by itallstartedwithdefenestration



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Lingerie, M/M, handjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 22:13:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8818132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itallstartedwithdefenestration/pseuds/itallstartedwithdefenestration
Summary: Carl had an opportunity to kill Negan. He's still trying to figure out why he didn't take it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in an au where Carl stayed with Negan at the Sanctuary after 7x07 instead of going back to Alexandria. 
> 
> Title from "Can't Pretend" by Tom Odell. 
> 
> Carl is 17.

Sometimes, still, Carl will look at Negan and wonder why he didn’t kill him when he had the chance, when they were at Alexandria for the first time in two months and Rick, everyone, had ambushed the trucks, held their guns to Negan’s head and told Carl to bash his brains in with Lucille. It isn’t as if he’s never killed before—hell, he killed his own mom, and for all his shit-talking Negan’s right, you don’t come back from that. Three years on Carl still wakes up sometimes sweating feeling like her hand is on his wrist, like she’s staring at him from a pool of blood, her stomach slashed open in ribbons. His mom hadn’t exactly been there for him but he still misses her in a gaping aching sort of way, like a gunshot wound, when he allows himself to think of her at all. 

But he hadn’t killed Negan. He hadn’t even tried. Lucille in his hand and everyone, his dad, Michonne, Daryl—even some of the Saviors, though Carl’s sure they’ve been taken care of since—screaming at him to do it and he’d looked down at Negan, at that face he knew he was supposed to loathe with his entire being, and it was like he couldn’t even breathe. The sun shining on the back of his neck and the rest of Alexandria surrounding them, closing in, first time he’d seen the place in eight full weeks and it hadn’t even felt like home anymore. 

_He killed Glenn,_ the logical half of Carl’s brain yells at him. _And Abraham might’ve been a dick but he didn’t deserve going down like that._

_He killed Glenn and Maggie would kill you if she knew._

But Maggie’s not here. Maggie’s at Hilltop. Carl’s at the Sanctuary. And Negan’s alive, and try as he might, Carl can’t bring himself to regret that. Not yet. 

Well, at least not most of the time. 

“Carl!” Negan calls from halfway across the room. “Get that sweet little ass over here.”

Carl presses his hand on the floor for support, squatting as he is next to Joshua to “make sure he’s not fucking up, _again,”_ as Negan had put it earlier. Before heading out to do god knows what, and part of Carl had hoped he’d be gone until late, so he could have, like—at least twelve hours to process his emotions, but no, apparently Negan just. Doesn’t care about breathing room, because he’s back. When Carl looks over he’s leaning against that same railing he’d first inducted Carl at all those months ago, looking as always like the cat who got the damn cream. 

“What do you want, I’m busy,” Carl says, with his hair falling over his shoulder in a—god, he hates using the word ponytail, but there’s no other way to describe it. He can see Negan’s eyes lighting on his bad one in a way that makes something brief and instinctive flare up in Carl’s stomach. A bright hot flash of whatever the fuck kind of bad thing prevented him from taking Lucille down on his stupid head a week ago. 

Negan’s gloved hand flexes on the railing. “Just come here, don’t make me go down there and get you,” he says, and then he disappears behind the plastic sheeting that separates the main area of the compound from his quarters. 

“Got you on your toes, don’t he,” Joshua says, without looking up. 

Carl reaches out, taps him on the chin. “Hey,” he says, and then, when Joshua glances at him, reluctance and annoyance steaming on his face: “Just finish your fucking job.” He nods once at the furnace, straightens up. Mouth twitching involuntarily when Joshua’s spine shudders as he looks away. 

“Watch him,” Carl tells Dwight, and then he heads upstairs. 

Negan is in his room, as Carl had known he would be. Lounging on his chair with one arm draped over the back, an ankle crossed over the opposite knee. Head tilted a little against his free hand, faint amused expression on the face as he watches Carl walk in. 

“What do you want?” Carl asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Goosebumps that have nothing to do with the temperature coating his skin and he’d hope that Negan couldn’t see but then Negan seems to know everything. 

Negan nods his chin up. “Close the door,” he says, and, “Got somethin’ for you while I was out.”

Carl shuts the door, tugs on his hair. “What,” sarcastically, “like a present?”

Negan’s still just sitting there. Watching him without entirely turning his head. It feels like being scrutinized in a glass cage and Carl doesn’t think it should make his palms sweat so much. 

“It’s on the bed,” Negan says, and raises his eyebrows towards a bundle on the mattress. Carl walks forward, even with his back to Negan he can still feel those eyes on him, on his spine, on his ass. When he reaches down to take up the rags his arms shift and he hears a slight sound behind him but upon turning there’s no indication on Negan’s face that anything’s happened. 

“It’s dirty cloth,” Carl says, holding it in his arms as he used to hold Judith when she was still newborn. “Thanks, I definitely wanted more of this—”

“Unfold it, smartass,” Negan says, with his mouth just twitching at the corner. 

Carl does. And then immediately wishes he hadn’t. There’s a lump of something lacy and pink in his hands and he’s never actually seen it before in person but he caught his dad jerking off to porn once years ago and one time, here, accidentally, he saw one of the wives draped over the back of that luxuriant couch they have in their room, in a see-through robe and not much else. Hers were black, and skimpier than these, but there’s no mistaking what they are, all the same. 

“Lingerie,” he says, and embarrassingly his voice fucking cracks like it hasn’t since he was fourteen. “You got me—you got hot pink lingerie. For me.”

Negan’s smirking now, devil’s wise-ass grin, and Carl has one of those moments where he wonders very, very hard why he didn’t go through with it back at Alexandria. “Bingo,” he says, and makes inappropriate finger guns. 

Carl drops the rags Negan was keeping them in and just studies the underwear itself. It’s mostly lace and silk, a pair of panties and a bra. Thin and a little faded with age and disuse, the tags on the back rubbed almost totally clean. Smaller than anything Carl’s ever owned. 

He says, “Why,” even though he knows it’s a stupid question. The way Negan looks at him makes that flare shoot up bright and telling in his chest again, like a fire he can’t seem to put out. He’s never had anyone look at him like that before. It’s more intense than he knows what to do with, especially when Negan wants something from him. Like he does now, apparently.

Negan nods at the clothes. “Put ‘em on, kid,” he says. 

Carl knew that was coming, of course, but he still brings his eyebrows together because he should’ve killed Negan a week ago, he shouldn’t be helping him with directing the Saviors, he shouldn’t be attracted to him, he shouldn’t have gone back to Alexandria after two months of living at the Sanctuary and seen his dad and Michonne and thought, for the tiniest of moments, that he absolutely fucking despised them—

“And what if I don’t want to,” Carl says, because he knows he can get away with it. 

Negan unfolds himself from the chair in a lithe and dangerous way that makes a bolt of real heat, not just that flare of warmth, coil down Carl’s spine. His dick jerks in his jeans and he stares down at the panties, thinks of how it would feel, maybe, getting hard with that material rubbing against his sensitive skin. The scratchy texture of the lace juxtaposed with the smooth silk on hot flesh—

“Did it sound like I was asking?” Negan says, when he’s walked forward enough that he’s standing nearly over Carl. Leaning in and talking with his body as he does, and Carl looks up at him and wants, very badly, to scratch his hand on the stubble grazing Negan’s jaw. 

Instead he huffs out, annoyed more at the amusement creeping in along the edges of Negan’s eyes than at the actual words, and slips into the adjacent bathroom to change. The panties are a little tight and the bra is loose on his chest, puffing out around nothing. He can’t figure out how the clasps work in the back so he ends up with the straps on his shoulders, everything dangling in a way he knows it shouldn’t be. Standing in Negan’s bathroom in lingerie with his clothes in a heap on the floor. In the mirror his cheeks are so flushed they look ugly next to the pink of the underwear. 

He smooths his hands down his stomach, over the edge of the panties. They hug the v of his hipbones and bulge out around his dick, not quite fitting, the tight fabric cutting into his flesh. Tugs on the edges that curve along his thighs. It’s pretty material, pretty clothes. He closes his eyes, tries to picture a woman in them. Some woman. But all the women he knows are too much family, or anyway they used to be, and in the end all he can see is himself, standing here, gangly and awkward and not enough. 

Negan raps on the door. “Hey,” he calls. “You coming out or what?”

“I, uh—yeah.” Carl clears his throat. Tries one more time at the clasps before giving up. “Yeah, hang on.” He takes a deep breath, steeling himself, and then opens the door. 

Negan’s sitting on his bed, but he stands when Carl appears, breathes out. “Shit, kid,” he says, staring. His eyes catch on the loose clasp in the back. “C’mere,” he says. His voice hitting a register that Carl’s only heard once before with him. There goes that shiver again. In the lingerie it’s impossible to hide his dick’s interest in the conversation but Negan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t feel like commenting—both seem unlikely—because he just crooks his finger and waits for Carl to come closer before turning him around at the shoulder and fixing the clasp for him. The bra is tight too, almost more so than the panties. But it fits snug against his chest now, and a second later Negan’s bare finger is running the length of his spine. Catching on the straps. The other hand resting for a moment on Carl’s hip, close to the same edges Carl himself was fingering just a moment ago. 

“I want you wearing this the rest of the day,” Negan tells him, still in that tone. Carl isn’t sure he knows he’s breathing. 

“What, like—in here, with you?”

“No.” Negan’s fingers leave his back and travel up to his hair, adjusting the tail so that it’s less messy from the day. Stroking along his scalp so that Carl has to close his eyes. “Out. You still have to take care of my shit, make sure fuckin’ Joshua’s not fucking everything up.” His hand trips over Carl’s ribs; it’s almost too much. 

“Shirt on?” Carl asks. 

Negan’s mouth isn’t quite on his skin, but Carl feels that fucking smirk anyway. “Shirt off,” he says, and Carl exhales. 

“I don’t want to.”

Negan’s fingers leave his hip, and suddenly Carl’s being turned back around. Negan still looks amused, his head tilted. Carl wonders how far he could push before this stopped being a game, if it is still a game at all. He wonders, frankly, if he’d still want to push, the way he used to two months ago. Before he realized how it works here. Before he realized who Negan is underneath everything. 

“You seem to be confusing orders with requests a lot today,” Negan says, and when he trails his fingers down Carl’s arm it’s so light and deliberate Carl’s executive thinking shuts clear off. 

“…Fine,” he says, and absolutely does not let himself smile when Negan’s face lights up like he’s given him a damn Christmas present. “Can I at least put my jeans on?”

Negan snorts. “Hell, kid, I would never objectify you like that.”

Carl feels his mouth drop and that burst of heat explode in his chest. He doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or not and decides on a scoff as he heads back into the bathroom to take his pants off the floor. “So parading me around for two months shirtless hasn’t been objectification.”

Negan shrugs. “No air-conditioning in a building with massive glass windows, gets pretty hot in here,” he says. “I’m just trying to make sure you’re comfortable.”

“Says the guy who wears leather zipped up year-round,” Carl points out, tugging his pants over his hips. He’s not smiling. He isn’t. He kind of hates Negan for making this so difficult—or rather, maybe, he hates him for making it so damn easy. It’s like drowning, it’s pulled him under with no trouble. Except he—fuck, he doesn’t really want to resurface. 

Negan reaches out, slips a hand under the waistline of Carl’s jeans. His heart stops until he feels the rough fingers close around the underwear, tug up so that the edge is just visible. It rides on his dick in much the same way Carl had imagined it would when he’d first been holding the panties at Negan’s bedside. 

“You sure you don’t want me to stay in here?” Carl asks, staring at Negan’s hand on his hip. 

“Go do your damn job, kid,” Negan says, with no heat whatsoever behind the words. He slaps Carl’s ass on the way out of the room and Carl walks flushed and flustered back into the front of the compound. It’s a little awkward walking with the panties constricting him but he doesn’t let himself think about it, or about the way everyone sort of stares at him for a few seconds as he descends the stairs. Let them stare, he thinks, moving back to Dwight and Joshua. They none of them would dare to do jack shit. 

Dwight raises his eyebrows at the bra and the barely-visible line of panties but doesn’t say anything, just backs away. Joshua opens his mouth and Carl squats—Jesus that’s a new sensation—and touches his chin again. 

“What’d we talk about before I left?” he asks, and just stares at Joshua until he looks away. The anxiety in his chest bleeds away into something a little too close to satisfaction. No wonder Negan does this, it gives a fucking thrill like nothing else. 

The rest of the day passes like all the others have. Carl walks the Sanctuary watching everything, half-conscious of the way he must look, coltish and tanned and so young, hair up, bra covering but not hiding his nipples. He feels almost feminine, pretty. When Arat sees him she grins, gives him a thumbs up.

“Wear it like a Victoria’s Secret model,” she says, and Carl snorts, trying unsuccessfully to hide it. He really should’ve killed Negan, probably. He never intended to like anyone here, but they work the same way as his dad’s group. The ones closest to Negan are—really not that bad, and Carl can’t stand that he’s feeling attachments like this is his new family. He shouldn’t be thinking like that. It wasn’t ever supposed to get this far.

He’s counting the boxes Simon’s group had brought in when he hears footsteps behind him and then:

“Christ,” in a rough shot-through voice, and then Negan’s hand is on his arm and he’s being dragged into the nearest room. Door shut and locked and the light switched on and it’s a storage closet and there’s barely room for both of them and Carl can hardly think with the way Negan’s staring at him like he’s something to be devoured. 

“Wh-what,” Carl says. Though he knows what, can already feel the heat of it spreading through his thighs. Negan takes a step forward and Carl is right back as hard as he was this morning. Fuck. 

Negan’s hand comes up to rest on the door such that his arm is a barrier against Carl’s head. “Drivin’ me crazy,” Negan says, very quiet. “Watchin’ you all day, walking around like that. Wearing that. Fuckin’ distracting, kid. You hear me?” His fingers slip under the bra straps and Carl’s hips jerk involuntarily. 

“Maybe if you—fuck, maybe if you hadn’t put me in this you wouldn’t have been so—oh, _fuck,”_ because suddenly he’s being turned around and there’s Negan’s hand at the clasp of his jeans, working them down off his hips. Slipping under the waistband of the lingerie and wrapping around him, thumb skating across the head of his dick, Christ, _Christ—_

“Can’t fucking focus with you looking like this,” Negan says. His voice is like black poison dripping into Carl’s veins, everything floating and rough and hot and slick. His mouth on the side of Carl’s neck leaving stubble burn on the sensitive skin. Hand working like a piston on his dick. It’s only the second handjob Carl’s ever had from Negan but the way he works his wrist makes it feel like they’ve been at it for years. His other arm coming up to support Carl around the waist, so that Carl can feel the line of his own dick in his jeans, straining, pressed against Carl’s ass. 

Carl’s close fast, part of the perks—or perhaps the perils—of being seventeen and near-constantly turned on. He grabs back at the broad solid stretch of Negan’s thigh to steady himself, rocking up into his hand and grinding back on both his leg and his dick, and Negan’s fingers curl into his hair, inhaling a sharp tight sound.

“We sure are horny today, aren’t we,” he whispers, and Carl closes his eyes. 

“Shut… fuck, shut up,” he says, and then whimpers and comes all over Negan’s hand, his hips juddering, all the heat and power of his orgasm coiling out of him such that if Negan’s arm wasn’t there he’s not sure he’d still be standing straight. Negan works him through it until it’s too much and he loosens his death grip on his thigh—little lines on his fingertips where the denim dug too hard into his skin—and feels Negan’s arm leave his waist so he can slide it into his own pants. 

Carl turns around. Still shaking, still wrung out, but he knocks Negan’s hand out of the way all the same. Undoes the zipper and the snaps on his jeans, jerks them down to just past his hips. His dick is thick and swollen and the size surprises Carl maybe more than it should have, considering he’s felt the outline of it before three times now, but he doesn’t let himself think before he’s reaching out, wrapping his hands around it. 

“Fuck,” Negan hisses, staring. Carl’s fingers are skinny, his wrists bird-thin next to the lithe and agile power of Negan’s body. But Negan doesn’t complain and he doesn’t pull away. Carl works him the way he’s jerked himself before, the way he watched Negan jerk him last week, and when Negan’s close to coming Carl spits on his palm and fucks the slit and Negan says, strained, “So you were paying attention,” and then comes, spattering Carl’s hand and his wrist and a bit onto his own t-shirt. The sight makes Carl’s dick twitch again despite its oversensitivity and he has to cup himself to keep from doing anything stupid like begging. 

It’s quiet for a few seconds after. The heat in Negan’s eyes seems to have taken on a different tone. The closet is small enough that it’s sweaty now, smelling of sex. Carl watches Negan tuck himself back in, watches him lean down a little to pull Carl’s own pants back up over his hips. Leaving them undone so that the lace shows through, and Carl opens his mouth with no idea of what he wants to say and finds himself being pulled forward. A second later Negan’s mouth is on his, the stubble scraping at his jaw and chin and lips and it should be uncomfortable but Carl arches into it, finds himself aching and desperate for it in a way he wouldn’t have expected to be. Negan tucks his hand under Carl’s jaw, lifting his head, tongue in his mouth. His lips are hot and a little chapped and wet and he kisses as he does everything else with his whole body, rocking his hips a little, moving their mouths together in a way that makes Carl wonder if he could devour him whole. 

“Can I,” Carl mumbles, when Negan pauses between kisses that alternate between soft and small and then deep and rough and sinful. “Can I go—”

“Just a second,” Negan says. Working them together like this was all he wanted in the first place. It should be weird. Why isn’t it weird? It’s just fucking—really fucking good. Better than it was with Enid. Negan’s hand is on his chest and his other hand is supporting him at the waist again and Carl tilts his head back and lets himself be swallowed whole. Moans a little into the kiss, hurt trembly noise, and Negan sighs, strokes his hair, pulls away enough to whisper:

“That’s my boy,” against his mouth, and then moves in again. 

They don’t leave for a long time. It feels like hours, Carl knows that can’t be right but he stopped trying to keep track around the time that Negan discovered he really likes when his neck gets kissed too. Carl’s pressed against the door and his hands are on Negan’s hips and he’s slumped in his arms and it’s warm, it’s so warm, and dark—Negan must have turned the light back off at some point—and quiet, and Carl can’t think, doesn’t want to think. His whole mouth tastes like Negan. His lips are sore and chapped themselves, his skin feels burnt from the stubble. Negan’s kissing him into fucking oblivion and he doesn’t care. He’s achy from the orgasm and feels raw and split open and tired and like he never wants to move again. 

He must fall asleep at some point because one second his mouth is working at Negan’s and then suddenly he’s aware of Negan hoisting him up. 

“Okay, kid, let’s go,” he’s saying, and Carl wraps his arms around Negan’s neck, his legs around his waist. Hooks his ankles at the base of his spine. Tucks his head against the warm sweat-slick neck. Negan opens the door and steps out and Carl lets himself be held and carried, drifting in and out of awareness like he used to in barely-there memories in the backseat of his dad’s car on the way to visit his grandmother in Florida. He hears the slow murmur of voices—occasionally Negan’s, rumbling against his nose—feels Negan’s hand under his thigh, supporting him; the other, at the nape of his neck, keeps scratching gently up into his hair. Loosening the ponytail in increments as it rubs at the base of the scalp. 

When next he’s fully conscious he’s being deposited onto Negan’s bed, onto the soft sheets Carl assumes were once part of another colony, months or perhaps years ago. Negan’s tugging his jeans off, pulling the blanket over his shoulders. Carl’s throat aches, his eyes prick like he’s going to cry; he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t.

“I’ll be back soon,” Negan tells him, his voice coming like a slow wash through Carl’s muddied brain. “Did good for me today,” hand curling through his hair. 

Carl exhales. Curls tighter against the pillow under his head. It smells like Negan, leather and aftershave and cigarettes. 

Maybe he does know why he didn’t kill him, he thinks, drifting, throat still tight, Negan’s hand so careful on his head, his cheek. Maybe he does.


End file.
